The invention relates to distributed systems and, more particularly, to storage systems that utilize distributed hash tables.
Peer-to-peer (“P2P”) systems have become very popular and are a major source of traffic on the Internet today. Still, first generation file sharing systems, such as NAPSTER and GNUTELLA, have been shown to have significant scalability issues. Recently, a number of research groups have proposed a new generation of scalable P2P systems based on distributed hash tables (DHTs). See, e.g., I. Stoica et al., “CHORD: A Scalable Peer-to-Peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications,” in Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM '01 Conference, pp. 149-60 (San Diego, Calif., August 2001); B. Y. Zhao, et al., “TAPESTRY: An Infrastructure for Fault-Tolerant Wide-Area Location and Routing,” Tech. Rep. UCB/CSD-01-1141, University of California at Berkeley, Computer Science Department 2001; A. Rowston and P. Druschel, “PASTRY: Scalable, Decentralized Object Location, and Routing for Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems,” Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2218, p. 329, 2001; S. Ratnasamy, et al., “A Scalable Content Addressable Network,” in Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM, pp. 161-72 (San Diego, Calif., August 2001). In these systems, a hash key is associated with a file and each node in the system is responsible for storing a certain range of hash keys. A lookup for a particular key is routed through the DHT network to the node responsible for the key using a specific routing algorithm.
Storage utilization, typically measured by the ratio of used storage to physical capacity, is extremely important for commercial viability of applications such as archive repositories. The ad-hoc and dynamic nature of conventional P2P networks, unfortunately, have motivated existing DHT-based networks to keep only minimal state per node, resulting in long routing paths and systems with poor utilization. Such architectures are not as suitable for commercial P2P applications, where the resource sharing is long-term and resources are contributed in a well-defined manner with predefined local rules of engagement. Accordingly, there is a need for different type of peer-to-peer architecture that takes advantage of the nature of the stable dedicated resources to offer better utilization and performance than traditional P2P systems.